Iran hanged five people accused of "anti-revolutionary" acts, the official IRNA news agency reported on Sunday. Farzad Kamangar, Ali Haydarian, Farhad Vakili and Shirin Alam-Houli were members of the Party of Free Life of Kurdistan (PJAK), an offshoot of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) which took up arms in 1984 for an ethnic homeland in south-east Turkey and north-west Iran.
The other man executed, Mehdi Eslamian, was involved in a mosque bombing in the central city of Shiraz in 2008 that killed 14 people, IRNA said. "The five, including one woman, were hanged inside Tehran's Evin prison on Sunday morning ... They confessed carrying out deadly terrorist operations in the country in the past years," IRNA said.
Iran sees PJAK, which seeks autonomy for Kurdish areas in Iran and shelters in Iraq's north-eastern border provinces, as a terrorist group. In recent years, Iranian forces have often clashed with PJAK guerrillas, who operate out of bases in northern Iraq. Kurds are large minorities in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria.
The five who were executed were convicted in 2008. They were hanged after a Supreme Court upheld their death sentences. IRNA said three of them were founders of PJAK group in Iran and were also involved in bombings that killed members of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, an elite force that is separate from Iran's regular armed forces.